Insights and attitude about PR, journalism and traditional and social media.

Monday, January 7, 2019

Enough of To Do's, Here's My To Don't List

Today I feel
overwhelmed by my To-Do list. What I really need is a To-Don't list... The only
problem: For a long time, I haven't had time to develop one.

With the start of a new year, I decided to identify some resolutions for things I need either to not
do or to stop doing.

Don't multitask. There may be some tasks when multitasking is
fine -- like folding laundry while listening to a podcast -- but it often
seems that multitasking takes longer to finish each of the tasks than if I
handled them separately. So I'm going to try to monotask (as that a word?)
-- focus on one task as time. And I will try to reduce distractions. (For more, check out "This chart will show you when you can multitask and when you can’t" from Fast Company. For some tips to reduce multitasking, check out the productivity hacks: 1) Banish desk chaos. 2) Ask for deadlines. 3) Make a night-before plan. 8 Plan for the unexpected (so let's explain that the numbers are from the article, which you should check out.)

Don't spend too much time on Twitter,
Facebook, BuzzFeed.
This will be a bit tricky since we help clients with social media. That
said, it's one thing to be engaged on social media when working for a
client and another because I'm bored or finding it hard to focus. I may
have caught up with what friends are doing but I probably should pick up
the phone and talk to some of those people. One strategy: to set strict
limits on personal use to avoid the somewhat empty feeling I get -- the
same as when I binge on junk food or crappy TV shows.

Don’t put off the work that’s
tough to do or is important but less interesting. No one likes doing the hard work, the heavy
lifting, the sometimes-joyless tasks. But if you put off those tasks, you’ll
never get them done, and they’ll weight heavier on you. So I’m going to try
to start the day doing the least appealing but important tasks first, and
then reward myself by handling the things I enjoy doing. I’m hoping knowing
there’s something else I look forward to as soon as I finish the
unpleasant task will serve as an incentive to more efficiently get through
the dreaded work.

Don't break my schedule into tiny bite-size
units. I have a tendency to
overschedule but I've found that when I give myself permission to block
out an hour or two to do a project (rather than trying to squeeze time
into any available free moment), the project is better, and completed more
efficiently. The challenge is that work can expands to fill the time you
have allocated -- like a meeting that should take only 30 minutes but
expands to an hour because that's the amount of time we all agreed to. If
we get everything done in a meeting in 40 minutes, I'm going to try to end
the meeting and move on to something else on my list.

Don't try to squeeze too much in. Overscheduling is a problem. The solution to
back-to-back-to-back meetings and tasks isn't always to squeeze more
things into less time or to multitask our way through meetings where we're
paying half-attention. It gets worse if we let ourselves get distracted by
emails, texts or notifications.

Don't go to a meeting unprepared or without an
agenda. I learned this lesson a long
time ago and it's still important. You don't have to stick to the agenda
but the process of thinking about an agenda and the goals for a meeting
make it more productive than going in and trying to "wing it."

Don’t rely on PowerPoint. When you have to give a presentation, you
have to give a presentation. Sometime people feel they have to get through
the presentation – so much so that they don’t interact with the others in
the room. It's important to be flexible and make sure you answer when clients
ask a question, even if you haven’t reached the section later in the
presentation that addresses that question. It looks like you’re dismissing
their concerns when you say, “I’ll get to that on slide 23.” We want
sessions to be conversations rather than a droning presentation, and when
clients ask questions, they’re telling you their priorities, concerns and
interests, and it’s important to pay attention.

Don't get caught up in crossing off everything
on my to-do list. We
all put a lot of pressure to get everything done but that's not always
possible. Sometimes things come up that need to immediate attention. It's
okay to carry some things over to another day. Especially because I should not let myself be ruled by my to-do list; for example, while I feel better keeping my desk organized, that's not a priority over more important, more immediate deadlines. So I will try to give
myself permission to not cross off everything everyday -- of course, I
still have to meet deadlines.

Don't get upset that most things take more
time than I estimate them.
Sometimes things do take longer. The information I thought I had may not
be as accurate or solid as it needs to be. Or it takes more back-and-forth
with a reporter to schedule an interview. Not over-scheduling may help
with this.

Don't continue to do the same things the same
way every day -- and expect that things will turn out different. That's Einstein's definition of insanity.
Some routine is okay but you can't expect things to be different if you
don't try alter your routines.

Don't let evaluating things delay making
decisions to seize opportunities. By that I mean, make sure to think about trying new things. Look
at the pros and the cons, and then don't belabor things too long. Make a
decision and jump.

Don't forget to check in with the team and
with clients. Don't assume everyone
knows the status of projects or has all the information they have to get
their jobs done. Sometimes emails get overlooked or forgotten. It's
important to check in to make sure everyone has current info and
expectations.

Don't be so busy that I can't stop and look at
the bigger picture for a client, team member or myself. Sometimes it doesn't take as much time as I
think to consider the big picture. I was once at a strategy workshop when
the leader asked, "How much time do you think it takes to make a
strategic plan for a client?" The consensus seemed to be that it would
take a couple of hours. Instead, the workshop led us through an exercise
that got us developing a strategic plan within the hour.

Don’t hope that bad news will disappear. No one likes
confrontations but it’s better to address bad news as early as possible
rather than hiding your head in the sand. You need to figure a solution
and address it early because otherwise it can become a bigger issue.

Don't feel the solution involves more of me. I've seen this with other small businesses.
The boss thinks the only solution is for him or her to spend more time on
a problem. Long-term, that doesn't work but the demands on the CEO are
such that we need to be able to shift gears. My business is team oriented,
and I need to keep the team engaged; another way of saying this is: don't
overlook the talent and insight on the team -- make sure they're empowered
to offer recommendations.

Don't check email, various news sites
constantly. In fact, during vacations,
I've turned off all notices and alerts. They're too much of a distraction.
But I'm also turning off the sound for text messages and emails when I
need a solid block of time.

Don't watch TV or Netflix when I have other
things to do. That goes with the not
wasting time on social media (number 2, above) but warrants, alas, it's
own bullet even if I'm just entering time sheets for client billing.

Don't forget to keep in touch with people I
enjoyed working with. We
all get so busy that we forget the personal -- the people we like working
with. We do too much by text or by checking out their posts on social
media but forget that that's not a substitute for actual conversations.
Staying in touch with friends and colleagues is important even if it's not
work-related.

Don’t get too busy that I feel I can’t
organize my desk.
When you’ve got lots of deadlines, it’s easy to let things pile up on my
desk. But eventually, the piles get overwhelming. When I started out, I
used to joke that cleaning off my desk was basically my job: it meant that
I had completed all my assignments. To an extent, that’s still true. Once
I’ve filed (and throwing out or recycling is filing) things off my desk, I
feel better and more organized. And I know I don’t have to clean the
entire mass of piles at the end of the day; a little bit at a time is perfectly
ok. So that’s what I’m going to do after posting this article.

Don't try to get by with too little sleep. I will try to get more regular sleep. (Let's
see how that goes.)

That's a big list, with some overlapping items. I will likely add more over time.

Meanwhile, here are a few To
Do's that I want to incorporate:

Set aside specific time to
respond to email. Right
now, I tend to let the sound of arriving emails distract me from whatever
task is at hand. It can take minutes to recover from a distraction so I’m
going to set aside time to answer emails. There will be exceptions such as
if I’m expecting an important, time-critical email or on days when we have
an important client news.

Define what results look
like. In other words, don’t assume
everyone understands what the results should be. It’s important to spend time
setting expectations in advance. At the same time, make sure the
deliverables are relevant to the client so that it’s not like opening a
pack of socks for your birthday when you expected an Xbox.

Keep upgrading and changing
skill sets and talents to fit the needs of an ever-changing marketplace. It’s easy to be so busy that you feel you
don’t have time to learn or that you’re so good, you have nothing else to
learn. You can’t succeed or continue to succeed by being complacent. You’ve
got to continue to learn new approaches, look for new insights and
understandings as the business world evolves. Sticking to what you used to
do, and doing only the things that used to work, won’t get you very far.
We have a client who pivoted his business three times, moving to where the
market was heading, buying new equipment and either retraining current
employees to get new skills or hiring new employees who had those skills.
The results: the company made the Inc. 5000 of the Fastest Growing Private
Companies for three years as a 20-year-old company, when many companies’
growth starts to slow down.

Make my emails more actionable. Advice from Fast Company profile of the president of Land o' Lakes: Write in the subject line what the email is about. Tell the person up-front: is a decision needed or do you I need the recipient to look at something or is it a "When you have time, take a look at this?" -- so they can prioritize effectively.

"The imperative is to manage our time, not our work. This is why
the whole question of balance and finishing our work is insane. There are only
24 hours in a day, so what difference does it really make if you work 10 hours
or 14, given that there are a thousand potential hours of work? The real
question is the incredible rigor of what goes into the hours you allocate.

"As I look at the most effective people we've studied, a 'stop-doing' list or not-to-do list is more important than a to-do
list, because the to-do list is infinite. For every big, annual priority you
put on the to-do list, you need a corresponding item on the stop-doing list.
It's like an accounting balance.

"I’ve found that real change comes from genuine displeasure with
oneself. Anything less -- including the usual 'I really need to...lose
weight/get organized/exercise more often...' won’t survive the inevitable
periods of stress we all experience at one point or another."